The Wikimedia Foundation announced a new group of grantees working to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects. In early March, we announced the Inspire campaign, an initiative to create new ideas that address Wikimedia’s gender gap. Now we’re following up on our commitment to fund a first set of 16 new projects coming out of the campaign.

This campaign itself began as an experiment in proactive grantmaking. As with all good experiments, we’re learning as we go. We have shared findings and recommendations, based on a participant survey and a study of statistics for the campaign pages.

When comedian John Oliver called on the Internet to edit the Wikipedia biographies of United States congressional representatives, the Internet answered. Photo by Maryanne Ventrice, CC-BY-2.0

John Oliver‘s Last Week Tonight is a popular satirical late-night television show in the United States. In an episode aired on May 19, Oliver criticized United States politicians for voting against a whistleblower law that would protect independent chicken farmers from retaliation when they speak up about problems in the poultry industry. He called on his viewers to edit the biographies of these congressional representatives on the English Wikipedia, to include a vulgar statement about their relation to chicken.

This required Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to quickly coordinate on noticeboards, cleaning up vandalism on a wide range of articles. The incident shows the impact a comedian's tongue-in-cheek message can have on the Wikipedia and its volunteers.

This chart shows the revenue of Wikimedia Deutschland's fundraising campaigns from 2010-14, and each increase rate based on the previous year. Graph by Till Mletzko, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fundraising at Wikimedia Deutschland – and across the entire Wikimedia movement – not only helps us achieve financial goals, but also helps to raise awareness for our mission. In less than five years, Wikimedia Deutschland’s yearly fundraising efforts grew from €700,000 to €8,200,000.

Wikimedia Deutschland's goal for the future is to persuade donors to become long-term supporters of free knowledge and the Wikimedia movement. This report provides a glimpse into their strategy on how to maintain and consolidate their donor relationships. Looking ahead to future challenges, there are calls to intensify donor relationships, to focus on donors’ needs, and to further diversify fundraising communications.

Chemistry student Kamarniso Vrandečić started editing the Uzbek Wikipedia with some simple tasks, such as translating articles, and is now a major contributor. Photo by Karen Sayre, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Kamarniso’s Wikipedia editing adventures began when she discovered the Uzbek Wikipedia in 2007. Realizing the vast potential of what was a small project at the time, she tried her hand at creating and editing articles with no specific interest in mind. She translated articles from Russian Wikipedia to the Uzbek Wikipedia, and soon after, from the English Wikipedia as well, improving her Russian and English language skills in the process. There are now over 127,000 articles on Uzbek Wikipedia, many of which Kamarniso helped to create and improve.

The Wikimedia movement in Tunisia has grown actively over the past few years. Nearly forty Wikipedians, from around the Arab region and beyond, gathered last April in Monastir for WikiArabia 2015, the first Arabic Wikipedia community conference. The three day conference was a huge success, having included practical sessions prepared by community members, a session on the Wikipedia Education Program, and a Q&A opportunity with Lila Tretikov, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Active community members also shared their personal experiences with Wikipedia, as well as some of the offline projects and case studies they led from around the world. While no consensus was reached on whether to host another WikiArabia conference next year, most spoke of the value of this in-person regional event, and there was an infectious excitement for the potential of this growing segment of the Wikimedia community.

Wikimedians sometimes interact both online and offline – and these experiences are very different from each other. Hackathon photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Belgian anthropologist Lionel Scheepmans observes the differences between online and offline participation in the Wikimedia movement, based on a visit to the Wikimania 2014 conference in London. In his essay, he identifies some of the disparities between the values, ethics and organizational structures of online Wikipedia projects, and offline conferences and gatherings.